"A friendly warning, pal-this is a sports bar. " . casting crisis for a retelling of "Mac- beth"-Macduffhad quit to play Mr. Peanut in the Planters commercials- and four days later Gray opened at the Performing Garage. LeCompte went to work for the company in 1970. She started off as a designer. A year later, she was Schechner's assistant director. By the end of that year (with Schechner away in Asia), she was directing the group herself: When he came home, he cast her in Sam Shepard's "The Tooth of Crime," and eventually cajoled her into three more plays. He says that the things she hated about acting were the things that made her memorable as an actress: her fright, her embarrassment, and the look on her face that told an au- dience, "I wish I were someplace else." Most of the actors who went on to work with LeCompte started out at the Garage with Schechner: among them, Ron Vawter, a mainstay of the Wooster Group, who died, of AIDS, in 1994, at the age of forty-five; and Willem Dafoe, who was a twenty-two-year-old doc- tor's son from a small Milwaukee rep- ertory company when Schechner en- countered him at a theatre festival in Baltimore. ("What I liked was that huge face, that menace and sensitivity," Schechner told me.) But Schechner's own talents were, by his admission, fairly scattered. He wrote books about theatre. He was interested in perfor- mance theory-he teaches performance art at N.Y.U. now-and in the anthro- pology of theatre. In 1974, LeCompte and Gray formed a kind of company within Schechner's company, working 52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 8, 2007 . together on "Sakonnet Point" -the first play in the trilogy about Gray's troubled childhood and his mother's suicide, known today as "Three Places in Rhode Island." At first, Schechner told them that, as long as they were on the stage doing "Mother Courage" for him at seven, it was not a problem if they used it for their own play at eleven. But the break was inevitable, and, as one of their old colleagues put it, "Liz's star was ascendant, and that meant 'Exit R . h d ", L C " I ' IC ar. e ompte says, m ex- tremely competitive. In a group, there's only one leader, and if you're the one d ' h '.c. " you on t ave to compete, you re lree. "Sakonnet Point" opened at the Garage in 1975 and made downtown theatre history. It wasn't a monologue, like Spalding Gray's later pieces. It was the first of LeCompte's download- ings-an acting out of the thoughts and people and confusions in Gray's head. LeCompte often uses the word "framing" to describe her work: "I hook into people's dreams about themselves. I make a frame for them. I get to know them. I say, 'Oh, let's find a way to give them back to you.' It wasn't that I had this thing about wanting to be a direc- tor. I said to Spalding, 'I'll make a frame for your dreams.'" By the late seventies, LeCompte and Gray were living on Wooster Street, across the street from the Garage and one floor down from the 10ft where LeCompte lives now. They were working on the last piece of the Rhode Island trilogy, "Nayatt School," and on an epilogue called "Point Judith." "What Liz was doing was the creation of Spalding," Dafoe told me. LeCompte says, "I just wasn't as confident as Spalding. He gave me that confidence because I could stand behind him. I didn't care if people knew it was me. I saw him as a character in his own drama. He was too literal. He had no visual sense. But the story? I could never touch that." Their relationship, though not their collaboration, ended in 1979, when LeCompte left Gray for Dafoe, who was then appearing in Schechner's produc- tion of Jean Genet's "The Balcony." Gray later described the breakup to a reporter this way: 'Whenever we'd play Monop- oly, she'd flip the board over if I got too far ahead. Someone that competitive needs to be with someone who can pass the whip, and Willem can." The breakup was actually much less rancorous. Gray and LeCompte divided their 10ft with a wall and a door that was never locked, and he acted in her productions for the next several years. Eventually, he mar- ried. (In 2001, he was injured in a car crash, and not long afterward attempted suicide. In 2004, he disappeared; his body was found in the East River.) The Performing Garage officially changed hands in 1980, with LeCompte putting together a new company whose founding members were to have a say on every invitation the company re- ceived and every project it pursued. From the beginning, the Wooster Group was known for the odd mixture of democratic illusion and despotic charm that she imposed. But by all ac- counts she hid behind the company, the way she had hidden behind Gray. She never put her name forward, and her friends say that for a long time not even her most attentive audiences un- derstood how much of the work was hers. Her son, Jack Dafoe-a public- policy researcher, three years out of Yale, who has his father's face and his mother's piercing curiosity-told me, "Liz still spends a certain amount of time hiding herself I think she was al- ways confident, but maybe she didn't think that as a woman she could do that-step center stage as the auteur." LeCompte spent twenty-five years with Dafoe. They never married, and they were often apart, with LeCompte touring with the company and Dafoe commuting between his life onstage and